Thursday, June 26, 2008

Funding of some recent progress by Google's Open Source Programs

As readers of this blog already know, PyPy development has
recently focused on getting the code base to a more usable state. One
of the most important parts of this work was creating an
implementation of the ctypes module for PyPy, which
provides a realistic way to interface with external libraries. The
module is now fairly complete (if somewhat slow), and has generated a
great deal of community interest. One of the main reasons this work
progressed so well was that we received funding from Google's Open
Source Programs Office. This is
really fantastic for us, and we cannot thank Google and Guido enough for helping PyPy progress
more rapidly than we could have with volunteer-only time!

This funding opportunity arose from the PyPy US road trip at the end
of last year, which included a visit to Google. You
can check out the video
of the talk we gave during our visit. We wrapped up our day with
discussions about the possibility of Google funding some PyPy work and
soon after a we were at work on the proposal for improvements we'd
submitted.

One nice side-effect of the funding is indeed that we can use some of
the money for funding travels of contributors to our sprint meetings.
The next scheduled Google funding proposal also aims at making our
Python interpreter more usable and compliant with CPython. This will be done by trying to
fully run Django on top of PyPy. With
more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used
as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008.

Many thanks to the teams at merlinux and Open End for making this development possible, including
Carl Friedrich Bolz, Antonio Cuni, Holger Krekel, Maciek Fijalkowski
at merlinux, Samuele Pedroni and yours truly at Open End.

We always love to hear feedback from the community, and you can get
the latest word on our development and let us know your thoughts here in the comments.

Bea Düring, Open End AB

PS: Thanks Carl Friedrich Bolz for drafting this post.

As readers of this blog already know, PyPy development has
recently focused on getting the code base to a more usable state. One
of the most important parts of this work was creating an
implementation of the ctypes module for PyPy, which
provides a realistic way to interface with external libraries. The
module is now fairly complete (if somewhat slow), and has generated a
great deal of community interest. One of the main reasons this work
progressed so well was that we received funding from Google's Open
Source Programs Office. This is
really fantastic for us, and we cannot thank Google and Guido enough for helping PyPy progress
more rapidly than we could have with volunteer-only time!

This funding opportunity arose from the PyPy US road trip at the end
of last year, which included a visit to Google. You
can check out the video
of the talk we gave during our visit. We wrapped up our day with
discussions about the possibility of Google funding some PyPy work and
soon after a we were at work on the proposal for improvements we'd
submitted.

One nice side-effect of the funding is indeed that we can use some of
the money for funding travels of contributors to our sprint meetings.
The next scheduled Google funding proposal also aims at making our
Python interpreter more usable and compliant with CPython. This will be done by trying to
fully run Django on top of PyPy. With
more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used
as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008.

Many thanks to the teams at merlinux and Open End for making this development possible, including
Carl Friedrich Bolz, Antonio Cuni, Holger Krekel, Maciek Fijalkowski
at merlinux, Samuele Pedroni and yours truly at Open End.

We always love to hear feedback from the community, and you can get
the latest word on our development and let us know your thoughts here in the comments.

Wow, I am actually more excited by hearing that pypy will be a partial cpython replacement this year than by the google money. Pypy is the most interesting project going on right now in the python world.

Congrats. I'm very glad to keep hearing about efforts to make PyPy usable with real-world applications and frameworks. The PyPy project is starting to send out positive signals, and this is something I've been waiting for.